The Commodore 2031LP is functionally the same as the 2031, but used the lower-profile tan case of the second version of the Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive intended for home computer use.

These drive models use a single-density, single-side floppy data storage format similar to that used by the Commodore 1540 & Commodore 1541 drives, but with a slightly different data marker indicating which model originally formatted the disk. The low-level disk format is similar enough to allow reading between models, but different enough that one series of drive models cannot reliably write to disks formatted with one of the other model series. A difference of one extra 'header' byte is what causes this write incompatibility.